Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam TEXT

The Rijksmuseum's collection of seventeenth-century Dutch drawings is one of the finest in the world. These two volumes contain all the drawings by masters born between 1580 and 1600, and give a kaleidoscopic picture of the art of drawing in the Northern Netherlands in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The drawings from this period display an unparallelled diversity of styles, subject matter and materials. Draughtsmen were in the forefront of developments that also took Dutch painting by storm. They left the security of their studios to go out into the countryside to draw nature as it really was. The quintessentially Dutch landscapes of Claes Jansz Visscher, Jan and Esaias van de Velde, Jan van Goyen and Pieter Molijn are the result of that close study of reality, as are the scenes of classical ruins bathed in southern sunlight by artists who visited Italy, like Cornelis van Poelenburch and Herman van Swanevelt.

The human figure, too, was drawn 'from life', yielding superb studies by such artists as Dirck Hals and Willem Buytewech. Pieter Saenredam recorded his monumental church interiors with the utmost precision, while at the other extreme Adriaen van de Venne gave free rein to the imagination in his witty illustrations for the works of the poet Jacob Cats.

This highly informative and scholarly catalogue in two volumes provides a valuable contribution to the study of Dutch art of the period. Every drawing catalogued in the first volume is illustrated in the second volume. There are also X-ray photographs of watermarks in the first volume.